American Gothic

“Nebraska” and “At Berkeley.”

Bruce Dern undertakes a journey in a new movie directed by Alexander Payne.Credit Illustration by Anton Van Hertbruggen

The wide-screen black-and-white images in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska”—of fields, plains, and distant hills—have a stirring vastness, and a great beauty, too, but the life has been taken out of them. Nothingness is at hand: the vistas are overcast with melancholia, and the towns—blank, empty, shuttered—are dead. The film chronicles a forlorn journey from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, and it could be called a wrong-way epic—it moves East rather than West, as mythic American narratives once did. Woody (Bruce Dern), an elderly alcoholic with long, lank white hair and a tendency to wander down any available road, believes that he has won a million dollars in a sweepstakes and has to go to Lincoln to pick up the money. His son David (Will Forte), whom he has always regarded with indifference, knows that the prize doesn’t exist and tells him so, but decides to drive him to Lincoln anyway. David, who is perhaps thirty-five and going nowhere himself—he’s single and stuck in a lousy job—reasons that Woody, nearing the end of life, needs something to keep him going. David also thinks that he should get Woody out of Billings and away from his rancorous marriage to Kate (June Squibb), David’s mother. When the two men arrive in Nebraska, where Woody grew up, they stop to see his brothers and other relatives, and David tries to get closer to the ornery old man and to build for himself some kind of usable past out of the family history. But he’s grasping at roots that keep disappearing. The movie keeps disappearing, too.

There is much routine sociability: men lounge around the TV watching football; families sit down to dinner; Woody’s boyhood friends, now rasping old sports, gather every night in a bar. They speak in cheerful generalities and answer questions with a hyper-literalness that slams the conversation into the wall. Bob Nelson wrote the script, which Payne has been mulling over for nine years, and some of it, enhanced by the deliberate pacing of his direction, is funny in a deadpan, black-comedy way. But the absurdist atmosphere feels thin: the movie is like a Beckett play without the metaphysical unease, the flickering blasphemies and revelations. We seem to have entered dim-bulb territory: People are eager to believe that Woody has won a fortune and refuse to hear David tell them that the prize isn’t real. Then, suddenly, they turn greedy—they want a piece of it. Yet the satire that was so potent an element in Payne’s “Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” and “The Descendants” comes off, in “Nebraska,” as pointless. These people have no pretensions, no power. What is there to make fun of? Payne is from Nebraska and still lives there half the year. He speaks affectionately of the state and its people, but if this is his idea of affection I wouldn’t want to see him working on characters that he disdains. In the past, he has taken on sturdier targets.

Many of the faces, looming in closeup or in group shots, are sculptured and strong, but Payne is engaged in static portraiture, not drama, and some of it has a heartless Diane Arbus feel—David’s identical rotund cousins spend their days sitting on a couch, obsessed with cars and nothing else. In “Fargo,” the Coen brothers worked with Midwestern blandness, but they had a ferocious plot that motored the movie; blandness was a cover for kidnapping, blackmail, and murder—and for wisdom, too, in the solid self-assurance of Frances McDormand’s police chief. Payne’s movie has just the futile journey and a father-son relationship that is so repetitive it feels like a subplot that somehow got pushed to the center. The only fully alive character is the long-suffering Kate, a quarrelsome woman with a mean tongue. June Squibb shows some energy and good comic timing; her needling commentary breaks up the studied desolation of the mise en scène.

Woody, in contrast, is hard to read and maddeningly elusive—fogged one minute, demanding and razory the next. Dern’s much lauded performance (he was named best actor at the Cannes Film Festival) is physically impressive. He’s a big man who, when he heads off down a road, stumbles and stumps, like a pirate with two peg legs. When he sits, he collapses into himself, and, at times, abandons himself to sleep, head back, mouth open. Egotistical and self-justifying, Woody is largely uninterested in the people around him. Essentially, he’s an old person as the Other—unreasonable and unreachable. Dern delivers an affronted glare and an outraged assertiveness, but he has nothing to reveal, and Woody remains unfathomable. David talks to his father’s old friends and lovers, and we hear mysterious and contradictory things about his past, but none of it links up with what we see in the present. In the end, Woody isn’t conscious enough to be an exciting character. It’s true that some fading people never come back into focus, no matter how much loving attention they receive, but making such a character the protagonist of a movie may be a well-intentioned mistake.

Our concern naturally shifts to David. He’s smart and funny, and Will Forte (from “Saturday Night Live”) has an intriguing face—a handsome strong jaw, crestfallen eyes, a worried brow. He seems to be exploring the character as he goes, and he surprises us. This comic may become a fine actor. At first, David is exasperated, but he reaches an amused acceptance: he wants to see how the trip will play out. He grabs at a heroic American past—a trip to Mt. Rushmore, a visit to the Nebraska house (now a wreck) that Woody’s father built. But the search doesn’t yield much. Payne’s movie “The Descendants” posed the question, Who will inherit Hawaii? “Nebraska” says that there’s nothing left to inherit. It’s a film devoted to inanition, made with considerable artistry, but it’s far from a work of art.

During an English class in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “At Berkeley” a professor reading Thoreau’s “Walden” with his students points to a passage in which the surface calm of the pond hides the conflict churning in its depths. In some ways, “At Berkeley” is an idyll, in which first-class intellectual work flourishes amid broad lawns and in massive buildings set against a gentle slope, all of it illuminated by the sunshine and cooled by the breezes of San Francisco Bay. But in 2010, when the movie was shot, the university was in turmoil: the California state legislature had progressively reduced its financial support from more than forty per cent of the university’s total budget ($1.9 billion in 2010) to sixteen per cent, and the administration, struggling to preserve Berkeley’s intellectual distinction while retaining its special character as a public institution, had begun cutting spending and raising student fees.

In the film, the chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, and other administrators hold clenched-teeth meetings about furloughing faculty and other such matters, and the students, like subjects living within the castle, feel the vibrations from the decisions made above. Wiseman shoots anguished scenes in which the generally liberal students, many of them devoted to an ideal of public service, vaguely long to get away from capitalism while wondering how they are going to fit into it; they hope not to be judged on how much they “produce.” Some want a less pressured existence. Some demand a free education. The conversations aren’t all that different from those heard on the campus nearly fifty years ago. Wiseman records the anxieties of this group, and at the same time, putting things in perspective, he shows the truly disadvantaged who sweep the campus steps, mow the lawns, build new roads, and provide so pleasant a setting for the students’ self-questioning.

When Wiseman moves away from the scenes of administration and protest, he heads for the stuff of learned inquiry. A physicist explains the origins of time to his students. A literature professor works through the erotic metaphors in Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” An entomologist describes the varieties of survivalist behavior in insects. Time, sex, death—classwork gets stirringly to the heart of things. There is a long sequence in a biomedical-engineering lab in which two graduate students and a professor work with a young man whose withered legs have been fitted into computerized braces. In order to get the mechanized part of the therapy right, the students have to investigate the way the human torso torques in normal walking—they have to understand the nature of walking itself. Wiseman’s movie is four hours long, and you come out of it reassured: though the university may have to learn to walk again, it will continue moving into the future. “At Berkeley” is in limited theatrical release and will be broadcast on PBS in January. I can’t think of another film portrait of higher education that matches this one for comprehensiveness, intellectual depth, and hope. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.